Ideology and "The Status of Women" in Ancient Greece

Abstract

This essay investigates the constitution of the principal research question on women in ancient Greece, namely, the status of women in ancient Athens, and attempts to formulate a historiography for it under three headings. "Patriarchy and Misogyny" reviews the history of the question, from the time of its canonical formulation by A. W. Gomme in 1925, back to its initial constitution as a scholarly question by K. A. Bottiger in 1775, and up to its conceptualization in contemporary and feminist scholarship. This section concludes with a statement on the historiographical inadequacy of this research question, and suggests that a historiographically appropriate formulation must be based on a reconsideration of the ideology which informed the initial constitution of the research issue. "Women in Civil Society" investigates the ideological underpinnings of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarly orthodoxy, concluding that it was founded on a historiographical tautology-with the example of women in ancient Athens providing the basis for eighteenth-century views on women's exclusion from civil society, and with the latter serving as the foundation for the investigation of women in ancient Greece. This section concludes with a discussion of some recent work in which the areas of investigation have been reformulated, but notes the overall exclusion from this work of issues having to do with race and sexuality. "Race, Culture, and Sexuality" takes up the treatment of women in ancient Greece by Christoph Meiners who, in 1778, was one of the earliest to bring together considerations of cultural (later equivalent to racial) particularity with that of women's status. This section goes on to show how the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reformulations of ancient medical theory generated the notions of race and sex as biological essences, and invented also, and also with reference to ancient Greece, a theory of sexual degeneracy. This section concludes with a discussion of the current debate in the scholarly literature of the nature of sexuality, and in particular, of homosexuality, in Greek antiquity, and notes that this discussion has inadequately integrated questions having to do with female sexuality in antiquity and modernity.